The sun sets on Lady Liberty...

...and on a beautiful weekend. Sisterfest 2012 was a huge success. Meg and Steph arrived early Thursday morning on a redeye flight from Salt Lake. The poor dears. But what would a sisterfest weekend be without our sister Courtney, right? Thursday morning, I'm checking my facebook and the first picture I see is of a paper plate with a face, sitting on top of a suitcase. The caption is, "Courtney was nice enough to watch our luggage for us!" For the rest of the weekend, we caught shots of Courtney at the statue, by St. Patrick's, getting into trouble, on the subway... They headed into the city to meet me so we could make it to our first Sisterfest activity - the Rachael Ray show. Our call time was at 1:00, and once we were there, Mary took us for a tour of the studio. While being prepped for the show, the comedic guy that cues the audience to laugh, clap, shout, etc. finds out that I'm a classical voice major at NYU. So, before I know it, I'm singing a snippet of an Italian aria for this audience. The taping was relatively easy, and Rachael was super interesting to watch. (My secret... I've never actually watched the Rachael Ray show before).

The 5 Crowley sisters at Grand Central!

After the show, we had some time to kill, so we found a place to grab appetizers and drinks, and did some shopping. Then we headed down to Hangawi, the incredible organic vegetarian Korean restaurant that I went to with Mary, Matt and my uncle, Andrew, over Thanksgiving. You enter the restaurant and they ask you to remove your shoes. You then sit on the floor and enjoy the best Korean meal you'll ever have. After dinner, we headed up to Times Square so the girls could see it at night, and did some shopping while there. Afterward, I headed home while they finished shopping and made their way back to Brooklyn.

On Friday, we met up after my class. We were going to do the statue of liberty. So I need to take an R train to Whitehall Street/South Ferry. Well, I catch the first N and have to transfer at Canal St. because N trains don't stop at the South Ferry station. So, I wait a decent 20 (ish) minutes for an R train, which takes another 20 minutes to get from Canal to Whitehall. If you aren't familiar with the New York City subway system, I must explain. Whitehall Street is 4 stops away from Canal. A mere 4 stops. On a good day, I can get from my subway stop into Brooklyn on an R in 20 minutes. It took me 20 minutes to get downtown. So I'm almost an entire hour later than I had planned to meet the girls, but we caught the 1:30 ferry to the statue. I've never been out to the island, so seeing the statue up close was actually really awesome. The first time I visited the city, we took a Water Taxi, which essentially just takes you close to the island and you get some pictures and such. Being close to the statue was different. Really awesome.

We headed back into the city to meet our dinner reservation at Pure. Mmmmm. We split the arugula salad with apples and winter greens for an appetizer. I had the cauliflower cous cous with persimmon scented dolmas for my main course. I wasn't as impressed with my entree as I was with both Mary's and Steph's. Steph had the sunchoke gratin with vanilla poached pear (which was incredible) and Mary had the Pear Ravioli with smoked long pepper mousse. Meg had the zucchini local heirloom tomato lasagna. The lasagna is really awesome as well, but I've had that before. Again, I was super impressed with the sunchoke gratin. For dessert, we split the dark chocolate semi freddo, a regular sundae and a mint chocolate sundae. Pure has the best desserts I've ever tasted. Raw dessert done right trumps non-raw dessert any day. The night was filled with amazing conversation, and I've taken away memories that I'll never forget. We all stayed in Brooklyn that night, and the next morning I had to head back into the city before them for rehearsal.

Saturday met us with different schedules. I had all day rehearsal. During my lunch break, my dearest friend David Stolworthy just happened to show up at my dorm as a surprise! It turns out that David actually is studying in New York this semester, and has been lying to me for months trying to keep it a surprise. Snitch. I'm so excited that he's here. I ate lunch with him and his friends Celina and Macy. I'm so excited that he's actually here.

After rehearsal, the sisters met me at my dorm and we got ready to head to the Met! Mary's friend was gracious enough to get us tickets to see Ernani, a Verdi opera that was a Spanish love tragedy. The voices were beautiful. The leading soprano was Angela Meade, who won the Met competition a couple years back. Her voice was gorgeous.


Sunday morning we met at the American Museum of Natural History. No matter how many times I see the museum, I still love it. You can never cover the whole thing in a day. Meg and I did the Butterfly Exhibit while we were there. Oh my goodness. It was absolutely incredible. You walk into this exhibit, and there are butterflies of all colors and sizes everywhere. I had five butterflies land on me. And Meg and I watched a butterfly hatch from its chrysalis. After the museum, we tried a Mexican food restaurant called Cafe Frida for lunch. We were super impressed. The food was super yummy. We tried their salsa sampler for an appetizer - they make 9 different kinds of salsa. We made our way down to Rock Center to do some more shopping, hitting up the Lego Store, J. Crew and of course, Anthropologie. After a very successful night of shopping, we did dinner in Brooklyn meeting up with Matt. We went to Bar Toto, this awesome Italian restaurant in Park Slope. Their Tiramisu is to die for. Steph, Meg and I split two kinds of pizza. (What is a New York trip without pizza, right?)

All in all, it was a tasty, fun-filled weekend. Only time will tell where next year's Sisterfest will find us.

♥ Em

England countdown: 17 days!